I’d like to announce my new project, readings.owlfolio.org, where I will be reading and reviewing papers from the academic literature mostly (but not exclusively) about information security. I made a false start at this near the end of 2013 (it is the same site that’s been linked under readings in the top bar since then) but now I have a posting queue and a rhythm going. Expect three to five reviews a week. It’s not going to be syndicated to Planet Mozilla, but I may mention it here when I post something I think is of particular interest to that audience.

Longtime readers of this blog will notice that it has been redesigned and matches readings. That process is not 100% complete, but it’s close enough that I feel comfortable inviting people to kick the tires. Feedback is welcome, particularly regarding readability and organization; but unfortunately you’re going to have to email it to me, because the new CMS has no comment system. (The old comments have been preserved.) I’d also welcome recommendations of comment systems which are self-hosted, open-source, database-free, and don’t involve me manually copying comments out of my email. There will probably be a technical postmortem on the new CMS eventually.

Last week there was a gag listicle making the rounds entitled If programming languages were vehicles and I lol’d along with the rest of them, but then I kept thinking about it and a bunch of the entries just seemed to miss the mark. And I’m in a silly sort of mood, so here is MY version: slightly different language selection, just as opinionated, 100% more Truth™.

The results are in for the 2014 Hugo Awards. I’m pleased with the results in the fiction categories—a little sad that The Waiting Stars didn’t win its category, but it is the sort of thing that would not be to everyone’s taste.

I too am someone who likes, and dislikes, works from both groups of authors. However, only one group ever gets awards. The issue is not that you cannot like both groups, but that good works from the PC crowd get rewarded and while those from authors that have been labeled unacceptable are shunned, and that this happens so regularly, and with such predictability that it is obviously not just quality being rewarded.

I cannot speak to the track record, not having followed genre awards closely in the past. But as to this year’s Hugo shortlist, it is my considered opinion that all the works I voted below No Award (except The Wheel of Time, whose position on my ballot expresses an objection to the eligibility rules) suffer from concrete, objective flaws on the level of basic storytelling craft, severe enough that they did not deserve a nomination. This happens to include Correia’s own novels, and all the other works of fiction from his slate that made the shortlist. Below the fold, I shall elaborate.

One of the most common ways to start interacting with a free software project, as opposed to just using the software produced by that project, is when you trip over a bug or a missing feature and now you need to go tell the developers about it. Unfortunately, that process is often incredibly off-putting. If there’s a bug tracking system, it is probably optimized for people who spend all day every day working with it, and may appear to demand all kinds of information you have no idea how to supply. If there isn’t, you’re probably looking at signing up for some sort of mailing list (mailing list! how retro!) Either way, it may not be easy to find, and there’s a nonzero chance that some neckbeard with a bad attitude is going to yell at you. It shouldn’t be so, but it is.

So, I make this offer to you, the general public, as I have been doing for close friends for many years: if you don’t want to deal with that shit, I will file bugs for you. I’ve been on the Internet since not quite the elder days, and I’ve been hacking free software almost as long; I know how to find these people and I know how to talk to them. We’ll have a conversation and we’ll figure out exactly what’s wrong and then I’ll take it from there. I’m best at compilers and Web browsers, but I’ll give anything a shot.

THE FINE PRINT: If you want to take me up on this, please do so only via email; my address is on the Contact page. Please allow up to one week for an initial response, as this service is provided in my copious free time.

Offer valid only for free software (also known as open source) (as opposed to software that you are not allowed to modify or redistribute, e.g. Microsoft Word). Offer also only valid for problems which I can personally reproduce; it’s not going to go well for anyone involved if I have to play telephone with you and the developers. Offer specifically not valid for operating system kernels or device drivers of any kind, both because those people are even less pleasant to work with than the usual run of neckbeards, and because that class of bugs tends to be hardware-dependent and therefore difficult for me to personally reproduce on account of I don’t have the exact same computer as you.

The management cannot guarantee this service will cause bugs to actually get fixed in any kind of timely fashion, or, in fact, ever.

I’m not attending the Worldcon, but I most certainly am voting the Hugos this year, and moreover I am publishing my ballot with one-paragraph reviews of everything I voted on. If you care about this sort of thing you probably already know why. If you don’t, the short version is: Some of the works nominated this year allegedly only made the shortlist because of bloc voting by Larry Correia’s fans, he having published a slate of recommendations.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with publishing a slate of recommendations—don’t we all tell our friends to read the stuff we love? In this case, though, the slate came with a bunch of political bloviation attached, and one of the recommended works was written by Vox Day, who is such a horrible person that even your common or garden variety Internet asshole backs slowly away from him, but nonetheless he has a posse of devoted fanboys and sock puppets. A frank exchange of views ensued; be glad you missed it, and I hope the reviews are useful to you anyway. If you want more detail, Far Beyond Reality has a link roundup.

I value characterization, sociological plausibility, and big ideas, in that order. I often appreciate ambitious and/or experimental stylistic choices. I don’t mind an absence of plot or conflict; if everyone involved is having a good time exploring the vast enigmatic construction, nothing bad happens, and it’s all about the mystery, that’s just fine by me. However, if I find that I don’t care what happens to these people, no amount of plot or concept will compensate. In the context of the Hugos, I am also giving a lot of weight to novelty. There is a lot of stuff in this year’s ballot that has been done already, and the prior art was much better. For similar reasons, volume N of a series has to be really good to make up for being volume N.

For all countries for which Herdict contains enough reports to be credible (concretely, such that the error bars below cover less than 10% of the range), the estimated probability that a webpage will be inaccessible. Vertically sorted by the left edge of the error bar. Further right is worse. I suspect major systemic errors in this data set, but it’s the only data set in town.

Here is an opinionated proposal, having no chance whatsoever of adoption, for how taxes ought to be levied on income. This post was originally scheduled for Income Tax Day here in the good old U.S.A., but I was having trouble with the algebra and then I was on vacation. So instead you get it for Canadian tax day. Everything is calculated in US dollars and compared to existing US systems, but I don’t see any great difficulty translating it to other countries.

Premises for this redesign:

The existing tax code is way too damn complicated.

It is the rules that need to be simplified, not the mathematics. In particular, the marginal tax rate does not need to be a step function just to simplify the arithmetic involved. You look that part up in a table anyway.

All individuals’ take-home pay should increase monotonically with their gross income, regardless of any other factors.

Tax rates should not vary based on any categorization of income (e.g. interest and capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as wages). This principle by itself removes a great deal of the complexity, and a great deal of the perverse incentives in the current system as well.

For a while now, when people ask me how they can improve their websites’ security, I tell them: Start by turning on HTTPS for everything. Run a separate server on port 80 that issues nothing but permanent redirects to the https:// version of the same URL. There’s lots more you can do, but that’s the easy first step. There are a number of common objections to this plan; today I want to talk about the it should be the user’s choice objection, expressed for instance in Google to Gmail customers: You WILL use HTTPS by Robert L. Mitchell. It goes something like this:

Why should I (the operator of the website) assume I know better than each of my users what their security posture should be? Maybe this is a throwaway account, of no great importance to them. Maybe they are on a slow link that is intrinsically hard to eavesdrop upon, so the extra network round-trips involved in setting up a secure channel make the site annoyingly slow for no benefit.

This objection ignores the public health benefits of secure channels. I’d like to make an analogy to immunization, here. If you get vaccinated against the measles (for instance), that’s good for you because you are much less likely to get the disease yourself. But it is also good for everyone who lives near you, because now you can’t infect them either. If enough people in a region are immune, then nobody will get the disease, even if they aren’t immune; this is called herd immunity. Secure channels have similar benefits to the general public—unconditionally securing a website improves security for everyone on the ’net, whether or not they use that website! Here’s why.

Most of the criminals who crack websites don’t care which accounts they gain access to. This surprises people; if you ask users, they often say things like well, nobody would bother breaking into my email / bank account / personal computer, because I’m not a celebrity and I don’t have any money! But the attackers don’t care about that. They break into email accounts so they can send spam; any @gmail.com address is as good as any other. They break into bank accounts so they can commit credit card fraud; any given person’s card is probably only good for US$1000 or so, but multiply that by thousands of cards and you’re talking about real money. They break into PCs so they can run botnets; they don’t care about data stored on the computer, they want the CPU and the network connection. For more on this point, see the paper Folk Models of Home Computer Security by Rick Wash. This is the most important reason why security needs to be unconditional. Accounts may be throwawayto their users, but they are all the same to the attackers.

Often, criminals who crack websites don’t care which websites they gain access to, either. The logic is similar: the legitimate contents of the website are irrelevant. All the attacker wants is to reuse a legitimate site as part of a spamming scheme or to copy the user list, guess the weaker passwords, and try those username+password combinations on more important websites. This is why everyone who has a website, even if it’s tiny and attracts hardly any traffic, needs to worry about its security. This is also why making websites secure improves security for everyone, even if they never intentionally visit that website.

Now, how does HTTPS help with all this? The easiest several ways to break into websites involve snooping on unsecured network traffic to steal user credentials. This is possible even with the common-but-insufficient tactic of sending only the login form over HTTPS, because every insecure HTTP request after login includes a piece of data called a session cookie that can be stolen and used to impersonate the user for most purposes without having to know the user’s password. (It’s often not possible to change the user’s password without also knowing the old password, but that’s about it. If an attacker just wants to send spam, and doesn’t care about maintaining control of the account, a session cookie is good enough.) It’s also possible even if all logged-in users are served only HTTPS, but you get an unsecured page until you login, because then an attacker can modify the unsecured page and make it steal credentials. Only applying channel security to the entire site for everyone, whoever they are, logged in or not, makes this class of attacks go away.

Unconditional use of HTTPS also enables further security improvements. For instance, a site that is exclusively HTTPS can use the Strict-Transport-Security mechanism to put browsers on notice that they should never communicate with it over an insecure channel: this is important because there are turnkey SSL stripping tools that lurk in between a legitimate site and a targeted user and make it look like the site wasn’t HTTPS in the first place. There are subtle differences in the browser’s presentation that a clever human might notice—or you could direct the computer to pay attention, and then it will notice. But this only works, again, if the site is always HTTPS for everyone. Similarly, an always-secured site can mark all of its cookies secure and httponly which cuts off more ways for attackers to steal user credentials. And if a site runs complicated code on the server, exposing that code to the public Internet two different ways (HTTP and HTTPS) enlarges the server’s attack surface. If the only thing on port 80 is a boilerplate try again with HTTPS permanent redirect, this is not an issue. (Bonus points for invalidating session cookies and passwords that just went over the wire in cleartext.)

Finally, I’ll mention that if a site’s users can turn security off, then there’s a per-user toggle switch in the site’s memory banks somewhere, and the site operators can flip that switch off if they want. Or if they have been, shall we say, leaned on. It’s a lot easier for the site operators to stand up to being leaned on if they can say that’s not a thing our code can do.